The Ig Nobel Prizes are renowned as a spoof alternative to the Nobel Prizes. The annual Ig Nobel awards ceremony is a celebration of curious, imaginative studies that make people laugh. Yet while studies of cats behaving like liquids or frogs levitating inside of a magnet might have you chortling, its founder Marc Abrahams has an equally important purpose in mind for the Prizes: to get you to think.

Once something becomes generally understood and accepted, then it comes to be seen as serious and important. Almost everybody either forgets or doesn’t become aware that this thing started out as something that everyone else regarded as nuts! Any scientific discovery seems like such an easy thing after it has been discovered, and it almost never was. Your understanding of a study might change – drastically – if you spend time looking at its details!

Marc Abrahams

Marc Abrahams writes about research that makes people LAUGH, then THINK. Marc founded Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony in 1991, and serves as its Master of Ceremonies. He co-founded and edits the magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), hosts the Improbable Research weekly podcast (distributed by CBS), and wrote This is Improbable, The Ig Nobel Prizes, and other books. He edits and writes much of the web site and blog www.improbable.com, and the monthly newsletter mini-AIR.